Editing Encyclopedia:Line breaks usage (section)

== Do not use single line breaks ==

Do not use manually entered hard line breaks within paragraphs when editing articles. Reasons for this include:

* If you want to indent a paragraph that includes single line breaks, you first have to remove them.
* If you want to make a list item out of a paragraph that includes single line breaks, you first have to remove them.
* If you want to turn a phrase that contains a line break into a link, or format it in bold or italics, you have to remove the line break first. 
* Many readers expect line breaks only where there is a logical, semantic break. Line breaks in source text will make them pause and search for such a break, and be frustrated when there is none. Consider this example:
*:The consequences of this Amendment to American society have been profound. First Amendment questions have been raised with regard to the separation<br />of church and state; civil rights issues; pornography and obscenity; political speech and organizations; journalism and its restrictions; involuntary commitment laws; and many more.
* <!--Text is no longer wrapped at the window edge of the text entry area, but where the author chose to make the linebreak. Thus, there will be a lot of whitespace within a paragraph, which may be considered a waste of space and visually distracting.--><!--This seems to have been fixed-->
* The appearance of the article source text becomes different from the appearance of the rendered output; it therefore becomes harder to find a sentence of the rendered output in the source text. Since writers often think in terms of paragraphs, it makes sense to organize the text that way. 
* Single line breaks in source texts may confuse new editors, who may think they are there for a special reason, and avoid editing these paragraphs because they fear they will break something.

Proponents of line breaks within paragraphs claim that they make diffs (the reports showing the differences between two revisions of an article) easier to read.
The diff feature highlights the changes within each line break delimited block of text
and provides unchanged text for additional context up to the third line break below and above that text.
This usually means that it highlights the entire paragraph, and shows one paragraph above and below it for context.
The changed characters are separately highlighted from the changed blocks in a different color.

It is hard to see how individual line breaks help in any way in that comparison, since their only effect will be to reduce the amount of context provided when a line is changed. In fact, arbitrarily entered [http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Ambrose_the_poet&diff=106339&oldid=40753 line breaks ''prevent'' the software from working correctly]: instead of providing the context of a full paragraph, it only shows changes in individual lines of text, respecting not even sentence boundaries.

One undeniable advantage of line breaks within paragraphs is that many [[Unix]] editors do not handle long lines well – they can either wrap characters at the screen boundary, wrap words at a fixed length, or not wrap at all. However, by this logic, line breaks would have to be entered at a fixed width, such as 80 characters, something which most proponents of the "use single line breaks" rule do not want and which, as seen above, completely breaks the diff context feature. Just inserting line breaks into some paragraphs will not make them easier to edit with these tools. Arguably, those who use editors which cannot handle long lines properly should just get better ones. Microsoft Notepad has had this functionality since its very first version, Gedit has it, [[vi (text editor)|vi]] supports it with the "set lbr" option, and every major graphical [[web browser]] has proper word wrapping even on Unix platforms.